Five services I use to automate life

My life of services I use continue to evolve. Below are five that are currently on my list, with the top three being on my list the longest. I’m extra excited for four and five as recent additions.

  1. Shoeboxed – I’ve written about Shoeboxed many times and it continues to be one of my core services. All my paper documents get shipped off to be imaged and stored on Evernote for future retrieval. This service alone saves me many hours of scanning, archiving, and retrieving paper documentation.
  2. Evernote – This is my digital brain. I store everything on Evernote both current and past information for retrieval. The imaging capabilities and OCR allows me to search for files, documents, and notes.
  3. Dropbox – Cloud storage is a tough space to be in. I have accounts with Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive, iCloud, and DropBox. Among all of these services, Dropbox continues to be my go to service because it integrates so well with many different apps. It acts as the link between my different machines, enabling me to keep a single copy across multiple devices.
  4. Fancy Hands – I’ve always wanted but couldn’t justify a personal assistant. Fancy Hands is the solution to that. I’m able to send my tasks to Fancy Hands from their website, app, email, or by phone. In my short time using this service, I had a birthday card sent out and researched some articles on a speaker I saw. I’m excited to use this service to scale up my calendar management and to shift many of my task items off to a more dedicated team. They can put time and attention on things that I probably would let slide or not have focus on.
  5. If This Then That – IFTTT is the mother of all integrations. I use this to link and automate my services. For example, I have a recipe setup to turn off my lights every work day at 9:00 AM just in case we forget to turn them off when we head off for work.

Published by Daniel Hoang

Daniel Hoang is a visual leader, storyteller, and creative thinker. As an experienced management consultant, he believes in a big picture approach that includes strong project leadership, creative methods, change management, and strategic visioning. He uses a range of visual tools to communicate business challenges, solutions, and goals. His change strategy is to build "tribes" of supporters and evangelists to drive change in culture and organization. Daniel is an avid technologist and futurist and early adopter.